Spotlight on Precalculus and Calculus

Hannah Salvatore Trinidad, Staff Writer

Precalculus and Calculus are taught by Mr. Keser. He encourages everyone to take as much advanced math as possible. Mr. Keser states, “Students should take these courses because math is beautiful! The harder the math, the more beautiful it becomes.” If you are interested in any STEM or business major in college, you will need to take a least Calculus. Some other college majors require a class similar to Precalculus.

Precalculus and Calculus can both be dual enrolled courses through Penn Highlands Community College. This is highly recommended since it saves you and your family a lot of money. In college, you would complete this class in a semester, but in high school, you get to spend the whole year on the same amount of material.

This year Mr. Keser is using a flipped classroom for his Precalculus and Calculus classes. This means his students learn material by watching videos and taking notes at home. This allows Mr. Keser to use class time to work on “homework” assignments during class, so he and other classmates are available to help and answer questions.

Mr. Keser has his own YouTube channel that he started seven years ago. He makes videos of all the lessons and material for his Precalculus and Calculus courses. He started doing this to help students when they missed class, feel asleep, or were not really in the mood to pay attention during class. Mr. Keser explains that one of the biggest benefits of his YouTube videos is that students can watch the lessons and take notes when they are ready to learn. Another benefit is students can pause the video to take a break or re-watch a certain part of the video again.

Even though Mr. Keser prefers to teach his students in person than recording the videos at home, this technique gets the lesson and examples out of the way so everyone can start right into reviewing problems and getting their homework finished. Mr. Keser was planning on flipping his classroom before COVID-19 shut the Clearfield Area School District down last year, so he is most likely going to stick with this way of teaching even once Clearfield goes back to normal. Mr. Keser implies that flipping his classroom made the A and B day schedule easier for him and his students to learn.